Original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) of structural products and particularly complex structural products such as aircraft and other vehicles provide their customers with multiple documents and data sources to help their customers to safely and efficiently maintain and operate their products. In the context of aircraft, an OEM may provide their airline customers with numerous electronic documents including maintenance documents, operations documents, engineering diagrams, technical drawings, wiring diagrams and the like. Each of these documents may provide information about a specific system, subsystem or part of the structural product, or address a specific type of maintenance action (e.g., fix an electrical wiring problem). All of these documents are authored in such a way as to enable a user such as maintenance personnel to locate information in order to perform a task, to gain knowledge, to help troubleshoot a problem with some system, etc.
Many times a maintenance person will need to look up and extract the same type of information from multiple documents or multiple locations in a document. For example, before an airline performs a maintenance check for one of their aircraft, it is useful to anticipate, purchase and make available all of the materials (parts, consumable materials, etc.) that may be required for that maintenance check so that all of the maintenance tasks that may be performed during that maintenance check may be efficiently accomplished without delay. This often requires significant, time-consuming research of the maintenance tasks, and find out what parts may be required to perform the maintenance tasks. This research is not only time consuming for the user, but also requires significant computing resources to search through multiple documents.